Adam Lewis Bingaman | |
|---|---|
 portrait miniature by Benjamin Trott | |
| Born | 11 February 1793  |
| Died | September 1869 (aged 75–76) |
Adam Lewis "A.L." Bingaman (February 11, 1793 [1] - September 6, 1869 [2] ) was an American politician. He held the top offices of both houses of the Mississippi Legislature: was the President of the Mississippi State Senate from 1838 to 1840, and the Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1834 to 1836.
Bingaman studied law in Massachusetts, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts, Harvard University Class of 1812. [3] While in Boston he met and married Julia Maria Murray, daughter of Judith Sargent Murray, feminist, poet, and writer of the Universalist Church in America.
Murray and her daughter went to live at Fatherland, the Bingaman family plantation in Natchez, Mississippi. [4] Life on the plantation was privileged. The noted race horse, Lexington was stabled at the Bingaman plantation while being trained by John Benjamin Pryor, the horse trainer at the top of his field. Bingaman was a slaveholder, holding 230 slaves in 1850 and 310 in 1860. [5] Bingaman had a relationship with a free black woman, Mary E. Williams, and may have fathered as many as six children: Frances Ann, wife of Pryor; Cordelia, Emilie, Marie Sophie Charlotte, James and Henriette. [6]
As a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives in 1833, Bingaman headed a select committee during the Nullification Crisis that preceded the American Civil War. [7] He served as the president of the State Senate from 1838 to 1840. Bingaman was described by his peers as "a man of rare qualifications for a popular leader, being gifted by nature in mind and personal appearance (which was most dignified and commanding), with a polished education and fascinating manners; he was a natural orator." [8] After Charles Lynch was elected governor of Mississippi, Bingaman read Lynch's inaugural speech to the Mississippi Assembly. [9] Bingaman's reputation as an orator was heightened by his speech to General Andrew Jackson at Natchez in January 1840. [10]
Washington County is a county located in the U.S. state of Mississippi. As of the 2020 census, the population was 44,922. Its county seat is Greenville. The county is named in honor of the first president of the United States, George Washington. It is located next to the Arkansas border. The Greenville, MS Micropolitan Statistical Area includes all of Washington County. It is located in the Mississippi Delta.
Natchez is the only city in and the county seat of Adams County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 14,520 at the 2020 census. Located on the Mississippi River across from Vidalia, Louisiana, Natchez was a prominent city in the antebellum years, a center of cotton planters and Mississippi River trade.
John Anthony Quitman was an American lawyer, politician, and soldier. As President of the Mississippi Senate, he served one month as Acting Governor of Mississippi as a Whig. He was elected governor in 1849 as a Democrat, and served from January 10, 1850, until his resignation on February 3, 1851, shortly after his arrest for violating U.S. neutrality laws. He was strongly pro-slavery and a leading Fire-Eater.
Robert James Walker was an American lawyer, economist and politician. An active member of the Democratic Party, he served as a member of the U.S. Senate from Mississippi from 1835 until 1845, as Secretary of the Treasury from 1845 to 1849 during the administration of President James K. Polk, and briefly as Territorial Governor of Kansas in 1857. He was responsible for drafting the 1849 bill that eventually established the United States Department of the Interior.
Luke Pryor was a U.S. senator from the state of Alabama. He was appointed to fill the Senate term left by the death of George S. Houston and served from January 7 to November 23, 1880, when a replacement was elected. Pryor was a Democrat. He is interred at City Cemetery in Athens, Alabama.
The Natchez District was one of two areas established in the Kingdom of Great Britain's West Florida colony during the 1770s – the other being the Tombigbee District. The first Anglo settlers in the district came primarily from other parts of British America. The district was recognized to be the area east of the Mississippi River from Bayou Sara in the south and Bayou Pierre in the north.
Benjamin Thornton Montgomery was an American inventor, landowner, and freedman in Mississippi. He was taught to read and write English, and became manager of supply and shipping for Joseph Emory Davis at Hurricane Plantation at Davis Bend.
John Benjamin Pryor, was an American Thoroughbred racehorse trainer. He trained Lexington, a top racehorse of the 1850s whose excellence in competition and reputation as a sire stud continued well into the 20th century, earning the horse induction into the United States' National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in 1955.
Francis Everod Rives was a Virginia Democratic politician and businessman who served two terms in the United States House of Representatives. After making his fortune as a slave trader, Rives became a planter and soon won election and re-election multiple times to both houses of the Virginia General Assembly before his two terms representing Virginia's 2nd congressional district, and afterward represented several counties near Petersburg in the Virginia Senate as well as served as the city's mayor. Rives also helped establish the state-chartered Petersburg Railroad.
Haller Nutt (1816–1864) was an American slave owner, cotton plantation owner, and agronomist in Mississippi. He developed a strain of cotton that became important commercially for the Deep South.
Philip St. George Cocke was a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army during the first year of the American Civil War. He is best known for organizing the defense of Virginia along the Potomac River soon after the state's secession from the Union. He commanded troops in the Battle of Blackburn's Ford and the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861 before becoming despondent and committing suicide.
Stephen Duncan was an American planter and banker in Mississippi. He was born and studied medicine in Pennsylvania, but moved to Natchez District, Mississippi Territory in 1808 and became the wealthiest cotton planter and the second-largest slave owner in the United States with over 2,200 slaves. He owned 15 cotton and sugar plantations, served as President of the Bank of Mississippi, and held major investments in railroads and lumber.
David Hunt was an American planter based in the Natchez District of Mississippi. From New Jersey in approximately 1800, he took a job in his uncle Abijah Hunt's Mississippi business. After his uncle's untimely 1811 death, as a beneficiary and as the executor of the estate, he began to convert the estate into his plantation empire. By the time of the 1860 slave census, Hunt owned close to 800 slaves. This was after ensuring that each of his five adult children had at least one plantation and had an approximate minimum of 100 slaves apiece. In fact, Hunt and his five adult children and their spouses owned some 1,700 slaves by 1860. He became a major philanthropist in the South, contributing to educational institutions in Mississippi, as well as the American Colonization Society and Mississippi Colonization Society, the latter of which he was a founding member.
Colonel Van Perkins Winder was an American sugar planter in the Antebellum South.
The history of slavery in Mississippi began when the region was still Mississippi Territory and continued until abolition in 1865. The U.S. state of Mississippi had one of the largest populations of enslaved people in the Confederacy, third behind Virginia and Georgia. There were very few free people of color in Mississippi the year before the American Civil War: the ratio was one freedman for every 575 enslaved person.
Theophilus Freeman was a 19th-century American slave trader of Virginia, Louisiana and Mississippi. He was known in his own time as wealthy and problematic. Freeman's business practices were described in two antebellum American slave narratives—that of John Brown and that of Solomon Northup—and he appears as a character in both filmed dramatizations of Northup's Twelve Years a Slave.
Pierre Michel La Pice de Bergondy, generally known as P. M. Lapice, sometimes Peter Lapice, was a merchant, sugar planter, and owner of a large number of slaves in 19th-century Mississippi and Louisiana in the United States. He was credited with Louisiana sugar-industry firsts, including producing the first white sugar, erecting the first cane-mill with five rollers, and building the first successful bagasse burner.
Margaret Louisa Kempe Howell was an American heiress, planter, and slaveowner who was the mother of Confederate First Lady Varina Davis and mother-in-law of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Upon her marriage to the son of New Jersey Governor Richard Howell, her father granted her a dowry of sixty slaves and two thousand acres of land in Mississippi. She and her husband faced financial difficulties throughout their lives and depended on the support of her family. After their plantation was seized by creditors, they rented a mansion known as The Briars from John Perkins Sr. Following the American Civil War, Howell fled to Canada, where she died.
James Campbell Wilkins (1787–1849) was an American businessman and political figure who served as a Mississippi territorial legislator, prospered as merchant of Natchez district, and owned thousands of acres and hundreds of slaves in the lower Mississippi River valley in the first half of the 19th century.
The Pharsalia Race Course in Mississippi was established around 1790 in what was then Spanish West Florida. Pharsalia Race Course was considered the premier horse racing venue in Mississippi prior to the American Civil War.
